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But we cannot afford a repeat of what happened during this electoral cycle, which was to show up late to the game and then not take the other team seriously.

There is simply no other way to put it: The election of Donald Trump was a disaster for the Left and for all those struggling against exploitation and oppression in the United States. We face an energized white nationalist movement, a right-wing-controlled legislature and executive branch, and soon, a Supreme Court hostile to labor and progressive causes.

One of the things we desperately need at this moment is hope. Real hope. As in, “we're going to freaking win” hope. And there is a lot of fodder for hope, despite what we will be up against in the next four years. Millions of people, including many who have never attended a protest, are asking what they can do to change our country's politics. Students are walking out of high schools and colleges. Individuals everywhere are pledging to support those who will be the direct targets of the new administration's repression.

For me, part of getting to real hope is having clarity about what happened—having the courage to be self-critical and grow. And I think this starts with a basic acknowledgement: The Left failed the test of this election.

To be clear, I don’t believe the Left bears the brunt of the blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat, and I reject arguments that try to score political points through guilt-tripping. Both long-term and short-term factors worked against a Clinton victory. The Democratic Party alienated large sections of the working class over the past two decades and then threw its weight behind a deeply flawed candidate with a dubious record on economic and racial justice. Clinton also confronted enormous amounts of sexism throughout the election. The FBI pushed a politically motivated leak in the final week. The list goes on.

Still, the election confronted the Left with a few key questions:

How do we assess the danger posed by Trump and the social forces backing him? Is that danger significant enough that we should work for a Clinton victory?

What is our larger vision around electoral strategy?

Will we put our own time and resources into defeating Trump?

Many on the Left did not feel that Trump's candidacy posed a large enough threat to advocate for someone they saw as the genuine candidate of the ruling class—Hillary Clinton. They took this attitude for various reasons: Trump had little to no chance of winning; Trump would not be able to move a radically racist and right-wing program upon assuming presidency; a Trump administration would spark greater social movement activity than a Clinton administration; Clinton was arguably a greater danger in terms of foreign policy; Clinton was arguably more neoliberalthanTrump, etc.

Many preferred a Clinton victory over Trump but believed the Democratic party (or electoral politics more generally) is ultimately a dead-end for political organizers serious about radical change, and that serious engagement with Democratic candidate campaigns serves to drain movements of transformative potential. Therefore, because of their larger vision around electoral strategy, they felt unable to call on the Left to mobilize voters for Clinton.

So for one reason or another, many regarded the Clinton campaign with indifference or hostility. I disagreed and still disagree with this position, but this short note is not intended as a polemic against my third-party and anti-electoral comrades, most of whom are now in the streets alongside us. Instead, this note is meant for the leftists and progressives who, like me, believed Trump to be a historic danger, believed it important to both build social movements and be involved in electoral politics, were not opposed to engaging with a Democratic candidate in principle, and yet failed to play a significant role in this election.

I don't mean that this failure occurred on an individual level: People didn't do nothing. (Although I certainly criticize myself on those grounds: I called voters in Pennsylvania the weekend before the election on behalf of Clinton—the first time I ever stepped inside a Democratic Party campaign headquarters—but I could and should have done more.) And plenty of people did much more. Many of my friends spent 10- or 12-hour days turning out the vote for Clinton in battleground states, either through unions or the Working Families Party. Others organized their friends to fly to those swing states for electoral work, registering ex-offenders in Virginia and people of color in Florida. Others led the important multi-racial feminist fightback in the wake of the Trump-Billy Bush tapes.

So many of us did all that could be reasonably expected, and more. But: We did not add up to more than the sum of our parts. We didn't have a collective vehicle for the Left to play a role in this election. We didn't have a discussion about how to move resources in a way that accorded with our political assessments. We were unable to broadly legitimate voting for Hillary in swing states as a left position. Perhaps we were in one of the key left groups that were too internally divided to develop an independent, militant means of participation in this election. But we cannot afford a repeat of what happened during this electoral cycle, which was to show up late to the game and then not take the other team seriously.

We must, of course, unite with all to defeat Trumpism in the streets: protesting, blocking raids in neighborhoods and workplaces, building a movement for sanctuary cities or sanctuary schools, upping our support for the Movement for Black Lives and Standing Rock, etc. Our priorities are disrupting the Trump administration, grassroots resistance, organizing militant activists in unions and community organizations, even sheer survival. And if these efforts grow, other possibilities open up: Remember how in February of 2011 massive demonstrations against Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker's anti-labor legislation pushed state lawmakers to leave the state in order to deprive the legislature of quorum? And in the wake of the Pulse shooting, public sentiment drove federal legislators to organize a Congressional sit-in for (flawed) gun control legislation. We could see a repeat of this—where mass mobilization and outrage push lawmakers to find creative ways to gum up the gears of government.

But I believe that if the Left is going to be relevant in the fight against Trumpism in the electoral arena, then the fragmentation of leftists who are otherwise united broadly around an inside/outside strategy—social movements and electoral politics, inside and outside the Democratic party—will have to change. Through this past election, leftists who agreed on the overwhelming necessity of defeating Trump lacked a vehicle for coordinating our resources and efforts, amplifying our ideas and experiences, engaging progressives and liberals, and building political unity through the process. This will be an even larger problem in the years ahead. Electoral politics will be one of the central foci of struggle, and in the next several years most of our people, our communities, will see defeating Trump in 2020 or flipping Congress in 2018 as the basic condition of any progressive change. I am not calling on folks to leave their left organizations to start a new one, but either we decide to be leaders in this struggle as a Left (rather than simply individuals or a scattering of grassroots organizations), or the Left remains marginal for another turn of the historical wheel.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan began his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair close to Philadelphia, Mississippi. That's the city where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 during Freedom Summer. His speech pledged his commitment to states' rights, a barely-coded sop to white supremacy. Four years after Reagan won that election, we saw a social democratic, multi-racial Rainbow Coalition grow out of a combination of militant fight-backs and local electoral victories. Chapters of the Rainbow supported local organizing while also coordinating nationally with other chapters to support Jesse Jackson's campaign to be the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

The profoundly anti-intellectual comments illuminate why the US is a police state oligarchy. 2 topics mentioned below, demonstrate a stunning ignorance about american conditions and history.1. americans have always been hostile to education and anti-intellectual. The scholarship here is vast. 2. americans have always worshipped technology. They have become more stupid, less able to think over time, as a direct result.3. the national character of americans is bereft of morality, worships money and hates freedom; there is no resemblance to the self image that americans possess and what/who they are. Again, the evidence is vast.

Posted by basarov on 2016-11-22 03:15:24

A wonderful hope. Cold historical analysis demonstrates that the american empire is near death, something I celebrate. It can not be redeemed--it never could. americans have been sadistic,imperialist, money worshipping, anti-education and anti-intellectual since at least 1760.The few who apprehend the history of dying empires cannot ignore the stunning similarities between the USA today and 4th century Rome, for example. Spengler, Rostovnezeff, Toynbee, Tainter are recommended. Decades ago Arthur Koestler compared the US to a dying Rome: "a similarly contactless society populated by automatons...a soulless, politically corrupt, everybody-for-themselves society."However, dissolution is less likely than Toynbee's assessment--"Empires all suicide." Rather than dissolve, they simply fade away. As the anthropologist, Thomas de Zengotita recently wrote, "america is a vast goo of meaningless stimulation."...sinking into itself.

Posted by basarov on 2016-11-22 03:04:15

Careful what you wish for. Dissolution of the Union may already be happening as we speak.

Posted by micmac99 on 2016-11-22 01:05:12

Yeah. One half of the country believes in the decency of humanity, the other half thinks humanity is a bunch of depraved fools who need to be controlled. I give this republic 50 years before we dissolve. When otherwise reasonable people disagree on the facts, this nation is done. I hope for all of our sakes that I am dead wrong.

Posted by micmac99 on 2016-11-22 01:04:04

An accelerated death of the evil american empire.

Posted by basarov on 2016-11-19 22:42:17

Given that public education is woefully inconsistent and inconsistently available throughout the country, no, it is not simple.

Posted by Arizona Eagletarian on 2016-11-19 17:57:24

What do YOU support?

Posted by Arizona Eagletarian on 2016-11-19 17:54:24

Oh, I don't think so. What we are facing is a country where at least half of the citizens demand the other half to get an education and contribute to society. This, in preference to sitting back, complaining about the minimum salary they receive, or the government check and food stamps not being enough. One half believe in work, one half believe in sucking on the government teat.Go to school, stay out of trouble, get a job, be happy. Simple, is it not?

Posted by Ujarak on 2016-11-19 15:18:44

We've done fighting for generations. We need to do something far more productive. We need to convert. A majority, somewhere between significant and vast, supports most of the progressive policies that Bernie proposed. We have a receptive audience but no way to reach them.

The internet is a flop. E-mails are a flop. They are all just preaching to the choir. They are self-selective and -reinforcing. We need media outlets that broadcast honest information that just washes over people like the drivel that broadcast and cable TV generate every day. But TV is WAY too expensive.

Radio, however, is not. I'm not talking about another Air America. We don't need a content network. I'm not talking about low power, neighborhood radio. We need individual radio stations strategically sited across the country. I'm talking about "blow torches" capable of reaching folks within a radius of two hundred miles or more. Radio stations are always up for sale due to market saturation by R-W yakkers, Christers and jock-talk. Content is readily available from syndication.

I'm pretty sure that In These Times doesn't have the millions to do this by itself. But labor, the environment, social justice, etc. groups, in combination, do have the resources if we all work together. And We the People will contribute, as Bernie proved, to his own amazement.

We must produce a counter narrative to the lies and ravings of Rush, Sean, Michael, etc. We must do it the way we did it in the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements -- through morality, fairness, what's right vs. what's wrong. Graphs and charts and tables convince no one. Stories people can relate to can convince.

We need to broadcast those stories. This is on us. Citizenship is required. The establishment is unwilling and unable to convert anyone. We must do it.

Posted by radwriter on 2016-11-19 15:12:26

Counter-revolutionary drivel! There is no american left. However, we deduce the actual meaning beneath the surface---this author despicably supports the Clinton Crime syndicate....adorable!